Crypto trading legend Peter Brandt says XRP may be hitting a long-awaited bottom against Bitcoin.
Brandt, who is well-known in crypto circles for predicting Bitcoin’s colossal crash in January of 2018, says he’s seeing signs of a turnaround for the third-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
The forecast is a surprise move from Brandt.
He has been bearish on XRP for months, and recently stated that he believes Ripple manipulates the price of XRP.
Back in August, Brandt said,
“Will Ripple be able to manipulate the market to keep $XRP above .2400? A serious breakdown at this level, and .020725 is in the cards…
I used ‘manipulate’ because it is exactly what Ripple has been doing since it introduced XRP.”
Ripple, which owns approximately 60% of the total supply of XRP, denies it has the power to impact the price.
In an interview with CNN, Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse pushed back on the claim, saying the company couldn’t change the price of the digital asset if it wanted to.
“If you look at the correlations between XRP and most of the crypto market, or what are often called the altcoins, you see a very high degree of correlation.
Ripple can’t control the price of XRP any more than the whales can control the price of Bitcoin. Some of these markets, particularly smaller tokens that have a lower market cap and lower flows, if you will, they are at risk of people manipulating them. But you’re talking about XRP trades an order of magnitude of a billion dollars a day of activity according to CoinMarketCap. So I don’t think anybody’s in a position to really manipulate those prices…
Around the ownership price, as is the case with Bitcoin, there’s some big whales that were early in the Bitcoin community. There’s one wallet that has a million Bitcoin in it. Nobody knows who owns it. In the XRP community, Ripple is the largest owner.”
Ripple routinely sells portions of its XRP holdings over-the-counter (OTC) to crypto exchanges and other third parties.
As the price of XRP dipped this summer, a crypto influencer and XRP holder named Crypto Bitlord created a petition urging Ripple to stop selling XRP, and threatens to fork the digital asset if Ripple doesn’t stop – threat blockchain researcher Eyal Shani says would likely fail.
Ripple says funds from XRP sales are used to support its business and to invest in blockchain initiatives through its fundraising arm Xpring.